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For three years running, Menlo Park, CA-based Morgenthaler Ventures has organized a fall event called DC to VC, with a focus on the conditions for health IT innovation in an era of rapid healthcare reform. The 2011 edition of the DC to VC event was organized around a pitch competition called the Health IT Startup Showcase, and Morgenthaler is reprising the format this year, but will present it for the first time in conjunction with the big Health 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Today Morgenthaler released the names of the seed-stage and Series-A-stage finalists who’ll be pitching their company’s stories to judges on Wednesday, October 10, the final day of the conference.

There’s no money at stake in the competition—it’s all about the chance to pitch on stage in front of a high-powered panel that includes big names like Rebecca Lynn of Morgenthaler Ventures, Michael Yang of Comcast Ventures, Andy Donner of Physic Ventures, Nina Kjellson of Interwest Partners, Lisa Suennen of Psilos, and Marty Felsenthal Partner, HLM Partners (in the Series A category), as well as Margaret Laws of the California Healthcare Foundation, Anne DeGheest of Health Tech Capital, Jack Young of Qualcomm Ventures, Tom Rodgers of Cambia Health, Ross Fubini of Kapor Capital, and JC Simbana of Silicon Valley Bank (in the seed-stage category).

“What’s in it for the companies is exposure,” says Missy Krasner, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Morgenthaler who organized this year’s competition. “It’s a point of validation for them. Last year, two of the finalists got funding right away, so it’s a great mantelpiece for companies that are up-and-coming.”

For Morgenthaler, the competition is a chance to test investment hypotheses about what’s hot in the health IT market, Krasner says. “It’s a great chance for us to stress-test our theses in areas like care coordination and predictive risk modeling,” she says. “Rebecca Lynn and I pride ourselves on being extremely comprehensive and meeting a lot of companies, but we were really surprised when we got 140 applications for the competition and I had only heard of about 15 of them. It’s a pretty good exercise for the pipeline. And it confirms trends.”

To be considered for Series A category of the competition, companies were required to have a product on the market with real customers and be seeking $2 million to $5 million in venture capital. In the seed-stage category, candidates were nominated by healthcare startup accelerators Rock Health, Blueprint Health, Healthbox, and Startup Health.

Below we’ve got exclusive details on the seven Series A finalists and the five seed-stage finalists, as well as several honorable-mention winners. The company descriptions are courtesy of Morgenthaler, and the photos and screenshots are courtesy of the startups themselves and are used by permission.

CarePlanners (New York, NY; founded 2011 by Alan Blaustein and Dr. Nancy Snyderman) is a platform that enables a nationwide network of careplanners to help patients and caregivers better navigate their individual and ongoing experiences with the healthcare system using a combination of personal services and online tools.

Starling Health (New York, NY; founded 2011 by Brian Yarnell) offers an intuitive, touchscreen bedside communication system for hospitals to improve patient interaction at the point of care and help streamline the nurse triage and communication process.

AgeTak (Hopkins, MN; founded 2004 by Pratik Verma and Rakesh Verma) unleashes big data in healthcare from dispersed data silos in real-time based on consent from the true owner of the data. It offers privacy-protecting big-data solutions for analytics in healthcare.